Q&A's

Among the more than 60 new hires that Bronx District Attorney Darcel Clark has announced for her office in recent weeks was Victor Olds, an experienced litigator who, as head of the Professional Responsibility Bureau, has taken on a unique job.

As U.S. attorney for the Northern District of New York, Richard Hartunian is the federal government's principal litigator in an area that encompasses 32 upstate counties and has 3.2 million people. He discusses his efforts to add resources to the office's civil division and to focus on affirmative civil enforcement in areas such as healthcare, defense procurement and environmental fraud.

In the early 2000s, Chief Judge Judith Kaye asked Justices Marcy Kahn and Edward Davidowitz to create a group that would promote understanding and reduce jurisdictional conflict between the justice systems of New York's indigenous tribal nations and the federal and state courts. The proposal was received positively by the nine state-recognized tribal nations and, in 2003, the New York Federal-State-Tribal Courts and Indian Nations Justice Forum was born.

The farm-to-table movement is coming to law school. Pace University Elisabeth Haub School of Law in the fall will launch a pilot Food and Beverage Law Clinic—a first-of-its-kind program where law students will help sustainable farmers, food entrepreneurs and nonprofit organizations.

In the last five years, about 13 percent of the state's guardianship petitions under Article 81 of the Mental Hygiene Law—a total of 1,001 requests on behalf of "incapacitated persons"—have come from Nassau County. Justice Arthur Diamond, named earlier this year to supervise the Supreme Court part tasked with hearing such petitions, worries that he and his colleagues are confronting a crisis: the inability to pay guardians for everybody who requires one.